
Two Poems by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo
Nuclear Fictions
We are completely miserable
but no one can tell
from the smiles on our faces.
Everyone is watching us on TV from home.
They think it’s a show about foxes.
They know we know.
We bow to the image of their desire.
It’s a game where the plastic is missing.
The world keeps coming
in and out of our coats.
So we give them a show.
Here, the hummingbird
flushed in a cool electric drizzle.
We run home in the rain
because we are banal.
We replay our childhood
braided among the apple trees.
Then the morning, then puberty,
then coffee before headed to work,
Then the cream colored walls,
cheap red lipstick through a dirty mirror.
This is the way you look at me
when we are going nowhere.
To them there’s always a man on the left
walking away from a woman.
There’s always a woman on the right
walking away from a man.
Sometimes I can’t tell if the cameras are on.
We nod our obedient heads.
Let them watch.
Let the sun sink to the surface of someone else’s sky.
If we leave our bodies now,
they will find their way back to us eventually.
They always do.
Until then, touch me, I am gentle.
This has nothing to do with the rain.
Let’s lean into the creek
and stare at ourselves in the water,
and wash our faces before we drown in them.
First Wedding Dance
The music stopped playing years ago
but we’re still dancing.
There’s your bright skirt scissoring
through the crowd—
our hips tipping the instruments over.
You open me up and walk inside
until you reach a river
where a child is washing her feet.
You aren’t sure
if I am the child
or if I am the river.
You throw a stone
and the child wades in to find it.
This is memory.
Let’s say the river is too deep
so you turn around and leave
the same way you entered—
spent and unwashed.
It’s ok. We are young, and
our gowns are as long as the room.
I told you I always wanted a silk train.
We can both be the bride,
we can both empty our lover.
And there’s nothing different about you—
about me—about any of this.
Only that we wish it still hurt, just once.
Like the belts our fathers whipped us with,
not to hurt us but just to make sure we remembered.
Like the cotton ball, dipped in alcohol,
rubbed gently on your arm
moments before the doctor asks you to breathe.
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Prize (BOA Editions 2018), DULCE, winner of the sixth annual Drinking Gourd Prize (Northwestern University press 2017), and Children of the Land: a Hybrid Memoir (Harper Collins Publishers in 2020). He can be reached at marcelohernandezcastillo.com
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